Hello all!

Hope everyone had a great holiday. I've got a small update with some fixes and changes for ya. Full details below!

• The Rotten (swamp zombies) can now be burned. Originally I had set them up to be immune to burn damage since they're sort of slime-y enemies that are able to melt and reconstitute themselves, but the intention just hasn't translated well and isn't an important enough feature that it's worth confusing players over. Humorously, since Rotten are extremely weak to explosive damage, the small amount of explosive damage that molotovs do on impact can be enough to splatter them on some difficulties.

• The glow effect on pickups has been changed to not make use of a secondary material, which should be a pretty big reduction in triangle count in some areas, as the voxel meshes are fairly heavy, and the secondary material was guaranteeing at least one additional render pass, which has been eliminated now.

• The "Quick Axe Throw" tertiary fire for hatchets has been slightly nerfed - hatchets thrown using this option will only throw at 75% force, slightly decreasing their range and damage.

• The voxel corpse pile in E2M4's Condemned Material chute has been removed and replaced with a simpler "gore pile". This map is heavy enough as-is and that voxel prop was contributing a fair amount of tris to the overall render

• A handful of additional voxel meshes were optimized to reduce their triangle count

• The "Invert Gamepad Y" option should now properly apply when loading into the game

• One of the corpse prefabs has had its LOD's fixed so that the voxel mesh will render properly instead of being invisible

• Some of the "mass grave" corpse pile meshes have been adjusted to not be floating/intangible - since these meshes were reworked to significantly reduce the triangle count, this resulted in the positioning of some of the existing prefabs to be off

• A weird intermittent rendering issue with the waterfall in E2M3 has been fixed ... maybe? It's not happening anymore for me, at least, but it was unreliable to reproduce in the first place

• Buying ammo in the Survival Shop should now properly update the player's visible total on the HUD

• The "Press <x> to Continue" message on the Survival Results screen should now properly show gamepad glyphs when the player has them enabled

• The light glow quad on street lamps should now properly billboard again

• A missing check message on a door in E2M2 was fixed

Hello all!

Wanted to get another little fix out before I power down my brain and sleep for a week!

• Submitted a request to Steam to set the default Proton version for CULTIC to 10.0.3, which they were able to do for me. This is a band-aid for the click-and-hold issues until there's an official fix from Unity for this Linux issue or I'm able to otherwise figure out what the root cause is

• Fixed an issue where getting grabbed by a Creep while in the middle of a throw would lock the player in a "throw state", disallowing weapon changing and other actions

• Fixed the paint job on a very rusty truck in E2M1

Hello everyone!

Got a small hotfix for ya - this one felt important enough to push to the main branch instead of going to beta for awhile first, so hopefully I didn't explode anything

• An optimization pass was done for E1M1 to try and alleviate performance issues in the map, particularly near the spawn.

• Several voxel meshes were optimized to reduce their triangle count

• A workaround was put in place for the issue some players were experiencing where players were getting stuck unable to climb ladders. I'm hoping to narrow down the actual cause at some point, but hopefully this fix will at least get players back on the heels of the cult!

EDIT: Oh fine I guess you can have the Lever Action Rifle back

(Just pushed a small hotfix to fix the Lever Action Rifle spawns)

This update adds a brand new non-canon map, "I'll Be Home for Cultmas"! I really got to have some fun with this map and do some stuff that's a bit goofier than CULTIC's usual tone, and pay homage to some of CULTIC's inspirations! This map features it's own unique arsenal with some new toys to play with, as well as a new enemy type! You can access the map from New Game > Bonus Content, and the Chapter Two DLC is not required to play the new content.

This update also brings all of the beta branch changes to the main branch, including the Automap, the updated burn damage model, and a huge amount of miscellaneous fixes and tweaks. Most of these changes were previously cataloged in the beta branch patch notes but I'll summarize them below!

Merry Cultmas!

• "I'll Be Home For Cultmas" bonus map has been added! It can be accessed from New Game > Bonus Maps

• Added a full AutoMap that fills out as you explore, marks locked doors and secrets, and allows you to place a custom marker

  • There are 3 settings for the AutoMap under Options > Accessibility:

    • Map + Markers - Full AutoMap + objective markers

    • Map Only - AutoMap only, no objective markers

    • Disabled - Disables the AutoMap, for those that prefer the original experience

• A few new text logs were added throughout the game that provide map markers for certain objectives, or to help guide players in the right direction in some areas that players were commonly getting turned around

• Additional resources were added to the beginning of The Fairgrounds to help resupply players after the Old Town fight

• Magnum ammo was added to the Bunker boss arena, as there was previously none available

• The version of CULTIC used for Unity has been updated from 2021.x to 6.x to address the security exploit discovered earlier this year.

  • As a result of this engine upgrade, Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 are no longer supported. While these OS versions aren't supported by Steam either, I suspect there are a handful of players still using these OS', so I have added a new branch called "v201archive" that will roll players back to the previous public version of the game so it will remain playable.

• The "Burn Damage" model has been completely reworked:

  • Rather than burn damage applying to an unseen "burn threshold" that would ignite enemies when depleted, burn damage now applies directly to the enemy's health pool, and they'll ignite if the fatal damage dealt is burn damage. This should allow fire to feel more straightforward and rewarding, as even a molotov that fails to completely ignite an enemy will still deal significant damage to them, and you can hose enemies with damage while burning to melt them even faster.

  • Burning enemies can no longer put themselves out by going into water, as they have to be at 0HP to begin with to ignite at all

  • Enemies that are immune to burn damage will immediately extinguish any flame particles stuck to them, making it a bit more clear when enemies aren't susceptible to burn damage.

• System/pickup messages have been overhauled, with icons, color-coding, and a priority system so that important messages (Cannot Save, Found Secret, etc.) do not get immediately overwritten by less important ones

• A significant amount of voxel meshes were optimized to dramatically reduce their triangle count, which should result in some performance gains on some maps

• The "Old Town" Survival Map has received an optimization pass to significantly improve it's performance

• The system message for "saving is not allowed" is now more prominent, with a unique sound

• The C96's capacity has been buffed so it always has multiples of 3 to better utilize the burst fire

  • Base: 10 > 12

  • Upgraded: 15 > 18

• The C96's burst fire has been buffed to fire much faster

• The LP42 flare pistol has been modified to now have 3 uses before it is depleted

• The spawn aggression in E2M6 Old Town has been lowered slightly, so the spawn rate should be lower overall allowing more breathing room to deal with enemies before they pile up

• The finale segment of E2M2 Newbrook Shopping Center was rewritten to support saving mid-fight

• A few shotgun shells were added to The Haunted Dungeon in the Fairgrounds

• One of the demolition charges in The Farm has been removed, with it now requiring only 3.

• The flooding chamber in The Bunker has been reworked, removing the Devourers and moving the valve to the following room, as players were commonly missing the valve entirely due to how busy that fight was

• The valves in The Bunker have been changed to squeakily rotate back to their starting position if player's don't turn them fully, as players were commonly mistakenly thinking they had fully rotated them and then moving on

• The first teddy bear in Train Station has been removed, as it's set up to stay with the first zone and got a bit glitchy if you carried it onto the train.

• The Harvester's hook attack now aims near the top of your collider rather than center mass, meaning it can be pretty reliably ducked under. However, the hook's aim is still set when the hook is thrown, so crouching too early will result in the Harvester targeting your new lower head height.

• The Harvester's hook travel speed has been slightly lowered

• Peacekeepers "stun threshold" was lowered from 80 > 45 to alllow their attacks to be broken easier

• Peacekeeper's delay between aiming and firing has been slightly increased

• Peacekeeper's walking shotgun attack has had the total shots reduced from 6 to 4

• Selecting "Map Loadout" from Scene Select and starting E2M10 The Manor will now cram the starting loadout into the player's gear, so that the player actually recovers some items later in the map.

• Chapter Start Maps (E1M1, E2M0 Interlude, E2M1, etc.) will no longer forcibly wipe the player's loadout, so you can opt to use Custom Loadouts to start fresh runs.

• The "Double Tap Dodge" option now has an accompanying slider allowing you to tweak the acceptable gap between movement taps that will trigger a dodge

• Tower Shields were adjusted to block all melee damage

• Tower Shields can now block and cancel a Harvester's chainsaw attack, but it will instantly destroy the shield

• "Prop Sniping" achievement should now properly account for any thrown prop, not just chairs.

• Some existing text logs now provide map markers for the player to follow

• The cooldown before thrown hatchets can be retrieved has been reduced

• Chosen Afflicted have had their speed slightly reduced

• Chapter Two survival maps should now properly save your results to the correct map entry

• The teddy icon on the Results screen should now properly display even if you skip the results

• The BB gun should properly use it's own damage value rather than that of the last equipped weapon

• A crate in E2M1 has been removed that was consistently falling below the map, eventually causing issues with the physics engine.

• Unlit TNT bundles that are retrieved now give the actual TNT weapon, rather than just TNT "ammo"

• Some difficulty-dependent spawns that were not triggering have been fixed

• A bug related to the above spawns causing enemies to become immortal has also been fixed

• The "Betrayal" achievement should now properly count all of the related boss' attacks, other than those that do not normally deal infighting damage.

• Included a potential fix for The Bunker's boss being able to cancel his death animation

• A couple of decorative, unhinged doors in the Castle were fixed to no longer be openable, despite being very humorous

• The setting for "Lock Ladder Climb Direction" should now save and apply properly

• Certain enemies that were supposed to be able to force open doors, but weren't, should now be able to properly barrel through doors again

• A minor collision issue in E1M5 that was preventing access to an item has been fixed

• A few erroneous displayed ammo pickup values were fixed

• Dropped unlit TNT/molotovs should no longer be able to be picked up if you are at capacity

• "The Gungineer" achievement should now properly trigger - if you've already fully upgraded a weapon, the achievement should trigger the next time you apply a weapon upgrade of any kind.

• The total enemy count for Interlude was fixed

• Fixed an off-hand edge case where reloading one-handed weapons on a ladder with a shield equipped could lead to a potential softlock

• "Heh heh heh ... Thank You" achievement should now trigger properly

• The final boss' weakpoint should now emit blood particles properly rather than dust puffs

• Snow should no longer penetrate through the walls of the Haunted Dungeon in The Fairgrounds

• The Fairgrounds' occlusion data was rebaked to fix a few glaring occlusion issues

• Fixed some instances where camera shake/tilt wasn't being properly adjusted based on the Accessibility settings and still shaking/tilting

• Using the "Load Saved Loadout" feature in Custom Loadout should now properly also apply any weapon upgrades from the chosen save file

• The player's bullet tracer origin was fixed for a few weapons where it was spawning offset

• Infested Armor/Arbalist enemies should now properly take impact damage from Incinerator projectiles, instead of being fully immune to them

• Enemies that were in a burning state when the game was saved should now properly load in dead.

• Decorative corpses should now once again play a splatter sound when destroyed

• Global volume overrides should now properly reset when starting a new game, so intro cutscenes won't be at zero volume if a new chapter is started after sitting through the credits of another

• A fix was added to prevent being able to close the "Game Over" menu using a gamepad, which could softlock the game

• A few instances of gamepad glyphs failing to load have been fixed

• A discrepancy in the sawed-off reload speed has been fixed, so the alt-fire and primary fire should reload at the same speed consistently (not counting the extra recoil time for the alt-fire)

• An erroneous "Check" message in E1M3 has been fixed

• All options in the Accessibility menu should now reset to default when prompted

• The FPS counter has been arranged lower on the HUD canvas so it doesn't overlap with the map stats on the weapon wheel / map

• A few missing textures were fixed throughout the game. The "Missing Texture" texture was also swapped out with a very noticeable hot pink texture to aid in finding unassigned textures, so if you see any hot pink textures, let me know!

Hello everyone!

You may have noticed I've been pretty quiet on updates lately... and now I can share why!

This will be a free update for CULTIC that adds a brand new non-canon Bonus Map - "I'll Be Home For Cultmas"! This map was made as an homage to some of CULTIC's inspirations that I got to have a little more fun and flexibility with. This map features a brand new arsenal, a new enemy, and of course, tons of cultists to murder.

"I'll Be Home For Cultmas" is roughly the same size as Interlude, so players can expect a solid 45-60 minutes of playtime from this map.

This update will also bring all of the beta branch changes to the main branch, so the Automap, all of the balancing changes, the brand new burn damage model, and more will all also be included!

I've got a lot of work to do in the next couple of days so I'm gonna get back to it - see you all soon!

EDIT: A quick hotfix was pushed for this branch to un-break the Survival pause menu that I managed to break

Hello all!

I got a few more minor issues reported and wanted to get a patch out for them while testing continues on the Unity 6 engine upgrade.

Details below!

• The cooldown for picking up thrown axes has been reduced to make them a bit less awkward to retrieve

• The Menu key (Escape/Start) can now be used to exit the Automap

• A potential fix was added for edge cases where players switched to the beta branch during the Manor but before they retrieved their gear, where the upgrade table stored in the gear was not lining up with the adjusted upgrade table size.

• You should be able to properly Zoom In / Out on the Automap once again. It seems that somewhere along the Unity upgrade chain, the scale that mouse wheel deltas are reported in was changed, so it was technically zooming, but in barely perceptible amounts!

• You should no longer be able to cancel out of the Game Over menu using a gamepad

• The Automap should now properly rotate on gamepad

• A few instances of gamepad glyphs failing to load have been fixed

• Some erroneous textures on E2M9 were properly assigned materials

• A discrepancy in the sawed-off reload speed has been fixed, so the alt-fire should cycle at the same speed regardless of whether you're holding the fire button down or not

• The "infinite reload" on the C96's new burst fire has been fixed

• An erroneous "Check" message on a door in E1M3 has been fixed

• All options on the Accessibility menu should now properly reset to their default values when prompted

• The FPS counter has been arranged lower on the HUD canvas, so that it should lay behind the fader backdrop when the weapon wheel or automap are open.

EDIT: An additional hotfix was pushed to fix an issue with this beta branch where weapon upgrades may not have loaded correctly due to a change in the size of the weapon upgrades array. This should now be fixed - you should be able to load your saves and have your upgrades properly load in, as long as you didn't overwrite your old save with a beta branch save where the upgrades weren't loaded properly. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Hello again everyone!

I had to update CULTIC's game engine version, which meant updating from the 2021 LTS version of Unity to the current version - nearly 4 years worth of engine updates all at once! This was done in order to properly evaluate the potential for ports, since that's not the kind of thing I wanted to dig into while being 4 years behind on engine versions.

There were some fairly significant changes to the physics engine with the update to Unity 6, which broke some thrown weapons and some of the "player teleport" triggers and events. I'm pretty sure I caught all of these and got them fixed - I did a full playthrough of Chapter One and Two and was able to play through the whole game with a couple of tweaks, so everything -should- be good to go, but with such a huge change for the game/engine, I wasn't comfortable pushing this all to the main branch, especially since I'm going to be away for a few days, so I'm pushing this to beta instead.

Full changelist below!

• A few shotgun shells were added to the Haunted Dungeon in E2M7 to help with all of the armored enemies

• CULTIC's engine version was updated from 2021.x to 6.000.x

• Thrown physic object velocity assignment was slightly tweaked to work more reliably with Unity 6's PhysX API. This shouldn't result in any noticeable changes

• The C96 has had it's base capacity increased from 10 > 12, and the upgraded capacity increased from 15 > 18, in order to make the burst fire more useful and not have any leftover rounds.

• The speed of the C96 burst has been significantly increased

• Specular "shininess" was removed from a few materials, as Unity 6's default specular shader was causing some materials to be much shinier than intended.

• Enemies should no longer be able to re-ignite after burning once, which was causing issues where kills were being counted twice, especially problematic in Survival.

• The E1M6 tank hatch hitboxes were expanded to make the TNT dunks easier

• Decorative corpses should once again play a splatter sound when being destroyed

• Global volume overrides are properly reset when starting new games, so the new Chapter intros weren't starting with lowered volumes from credits/results screens

• Changing the Automap color should now properly affect the entire revealed map

• The Automap should no longer have data bleed over from previous maps into the next map, with the data buffer being properly cleared between maps

Hello all!

I'm really hoping this is the last major patch for this beta branch and it can move on to the public branch, but I crammed some pretty significant changes in here so I expect there are probably gonna be some edge cases (or not-so-edge cases) that I missed when testing stuff out. Fingers crossed, but as always, let me know in the Bug Reporting forum if something is amiss!

• Burn Damage has been completely rewritten for all non-boss enemies. Previously, burn damage was applied against an enemy's "burn threshold", and if that value exceeded their current HP, they entered a burning state. This system seems to be a bit more confusing than intended and can also result in molotovs/flares/etc. sometimes feeling like they aren't dealing any damage, if the enemy has a high enough burn threshold / enough health to withstand the burn damage. The burn damage model has been changed so all burn damage is now applied as basic damage, and if the burn damage deals the final fatal damage, the enemy will ignite. This has a few advantages:

  • An enemy such as a Peacekeeper or Harvester who is hit with a molotov/lantern/etc. will take continuous damage, and even if they don't take enough damage to fully ignite, they will still have taken a ton of damage from the flame particles and be easier to finish off.

  • Enemies can be started burning with flame weapons, and then hosed down with damage from other weapons, which will whittle away their HP on top of the fire which is also burning away their HP, so a tough enemy such as a Peacekeeper who would normally soak up an entire molotov, could be made to catch fire by dealing a little bit of extra damage while he's burning. You could do this with the old damage system but less efficiently.

  • Enemies will not be able to put themselves out by jumping into water, since they have to be at 0 HP to ignite to begin with. Enemies that are currently burning from a flame weapon that jump into water will not take additional burn damage until they leave the water, but if they're already in their burning state, it will still be fatal.

  • Players using the "Show Damage Numbers" option will be able to see a more straightforward representation of the damage enemies are taking.

• Enemies that are immune to burn damage will now immediately extinguish any flame particles stuck to them, making it more apparent when fire is ineffective against them.

• The Harvester now aims his hook near the top of your collider, meaning that it can be reliably crouched under now - just make sure you crouch after he throws the hook - if you crouch early, he'll just throw it at your head's crouched position instead.

• The Harvester's Hook travel speed has been slightly reduced

• Selecting a Custom/Map Loadout from Scene Select and starting on The Manor will now cram the selected loadout into the player's Stolen Gear, while still spawning the player with no equipment.

• Chapter Start Maps (E1M1, E2M0 "Interlude", E2M1, etc.) will no longer forcibly wipe the player's loadout, so you should be able to use Custom/Scene Select loadouts to start a new run of Ch.1/Interlude/2.

• Mopped up some outstanding instances where the Screen Shake/Tilt settings weren't being applied, resulting in screen shaking/tilting even when turned to zero

• Custom Loadout Ammo sliders for Shotgun/TNT/Molotovs have been fixed to have the proper max values

• Using the "Load Saved Loadout" function for Custom Loadouts should now properly apply upgrades from that save file

• The player's bullet tracer origin was fixed on a few weapons where it was spawning in an improper location

• Damage Numbers, when enabled, should now properly reflect burn damage

• Infested Armor/Arbalist enemies now properly take impact damage from Incinerator projectiles

• Enemies that were in a burning state when the game was saved should now properly load in dead

EDIT 2 --

Another small hotfix to apply the automap fix to Manual/Most Recent loads, rather than just Quickloads

EDIT --

A small hotfix was released to push this to v.201d to fix an issue with messages getting cut off. Didn't think it needed it's own post, so I'm just adding it on here!

Hello all!

Hope everyone is enjoying Chapter Two and having a great spooky season so far!

Had to pause Ch.2 patches for a bit as I worked on an update for Bonerooms for a charity stream, but now I'm back to work on getting the Automap Beta ready for the main branch!

There are a few significant changes and additions, full details below!

• The Flare Gun now has 3 charges instead of being single-shot, and has a new sprite and reloading animation to boot! Due to this change, some flare guns may be removed in the future (such as the third flare gun in Old Town) to balance the newly available charges

• The finale segment in E2M2 Newbrook Shopping Center has been re-configured so it no longer involves an ongoing sequence, allowing saving to be possible.

• System/Pickup messages have been completely overhauled and now include some fancy icons, color coded highlights, and a priority system so that some messages like Secrets Found and such will stay visible longer and not get pushed offscreen.

  

• Trying to Quicksave when saves are not allowed will prompt a unique error message with a sound prompt.

• Peacekeepers are now guaranteed to drop a loot item, and will drop either a First Aid Kit or a full SASG.

• The "Spawn Aggression" in E2M6 (Old Town) has been lowered, so enemy groups will spawn slower with longer cooldowns. This nerf to the spawn routine is more significant on lower difficulties.

• The Automap should no longer wipe itself after save/loads - map colors were being correctly loaded from file, but the actual byte data was not being applied, so it appeared to keep your map data after one load, but it would be lost on the next save/load.

• Snow should no longer be visible inside the Haunted Dungeon on E2M7

• Occlusion data has been rebaked for E2M7, which should hopefully clear up a significant culling issue.